Michael Zilligen
Market Access Practice Lead
Ogilvy Health
The Payer Prognosticator
“Michael Zilligen’s clear-eyed view of the world allows him to focus on what matters and foresee market evolutions in a way that few others in my experience can see,” explains John Jaeger, Partner, DRG Consulting. “While common sense in today’s landscape, Michael focused on market access and reimbursement in the 2000s when payers were still an afterthought for many in the biopharmaceutical arena. To this day, Michael continues to lead his organization and team into the future as we enter a new horizon with Car-T and gene therapies further shifting the market landscape.”
For the last 13 years, Michael has made an art of developing forward-thinking strategies at Ogilvy Health, especially when it comes to the agency’s Market Access Practice. For example, as drug prices continued to increase and greater cost continued to shift to patients, Michael saw a vital need for more effective and efficient patient assistance programs (PAPs). He knew this would be paramount to the success of many specialty brands. In response, Michael created the roadmap for Ogilvy Health’s development of unique PAP solutions, which leverage technology to streamline the time from script to fulfillment—including the use of EHR. The result has been a year-over-year increase of 170% in the agency’s PAP practice.
Michael also noticed early on that payers were increasingly going outside of their traditional clinical teams to gain input on new and unique advances when considering coverage decisions. With the assistance of his data and analytics team, Michael was part of a team that pioneered a revolutionary approach to leverage new datasets and analytic models to identify and target physicians who consult for and provide clinical expertise to payers’ Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) Committees. The result: Payer Opinion Leader Mapping, which clients can utilize as they rethink strategies for coverage of rare disease products and new devices.
“Expertise is one thing, but trust, collaboration, and mutual professional respect are what it takes to turn expertise into a deliverable,” says Nora Tsivgas, President & CEO, Smart Health Partners. “That is what Michael brings to the table for me and others, not just in his own payer marketing group, but across the organization at Ogilvy.”
